Personnel Today: BAME leadership pipeline flatlining in FTSE 100 firms

Statistics show that only 3.3% of FTSE100 Chairs, CEOs and CFOs are black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME), with no improvement in this number since 2014, according to the Green Park Leadership 10,000 report.

The findings also show that in the Top 20 roles of Board and Executive Committee members, BAME representation dropped from 8.8% in 2018 to 7.4% in 2019. Whereas in Top 100 roles, covering the leadership pipeline, numbers flatlined at 10.7% in 2019 and 10.6% in 2018.

Trever Phillips, Chair of Green Park, noted that despite promises of change and improvement in gender diversity, “people of colour seem to be superglued to the floor.”

The introduction of Chief Diversity Officers is an essential move for companies that truly want to see a change. This has proved successful in the US and if the UK do not keep up with their competitors in this way they will fall behind.

While women are seeing an improvement at Top 20 level, particularly in Non-Executive roles, they too are failing to crack the glass ceiling in the Top 3 roles; Chair, CEO and CFO. At the current rate of progress, based on an increase of 16 females since 2014, it would take 50 years for women and men to have proportional representation in these roles.

Raj Tulsiani, CEO of Green Park comments: “companies need to focus on diversity in the true sense of the word and tackle both gender and race. If British Business is serious about presenting a modern face to the world, they must invest and provide the correct resources to match.”

The above is a summary of an article published in Personnel Today 4/12/19. For the full Personnel Today article, please click here.